


elephant

by Anonymississippi



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, F/F, post-bridge if the worst happened, tw: terminal illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:35:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25101769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: They don't talk about it unless Eve's drunk. And she is most nights now, gin in coffee cups and unopened envelopes from the NHS piled high on the counters. Her texts border on unintelligible.Villanelle has killed enough to know one thing: no one dies with dignity.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 82
Kudos: 176





	1. Chapter 1

_R uu commg.??!_

Villanelle slid her phone back into the pocket of her suit as she stared at her reflection in the shop window. Clad in another artfully patterned Van Noten she’d selected specifically for this evening she pressed forward, marveling at how quickly Eve’s texts could shift from tipsy flirtatiousness to outright drunken nonsense.

It was a good thing she was so forgiving, or else she might’ve been annoyed.

London smog and sound pressed all around her. It was Eve’s city, and phenomenal in its own way because of one special inhabitant, but the place was otherwise too constricting, urban and unremarkable with its indistinguishable towers of grey. Paris tasted like champagne bubbles and Barcelona like rainbow sherbet, but London was just… toast. Charred toast, even. Unappealing in every regard when the smorgasbord of the world was laid before you and rife for the sampling.

Her phone buzzed again as she doubled-back around a nondescript alley, keeping her eyes peeled for any tails.

_U dooont have to come 2nite_.

Villanelle stopped at a crosswalk and flexed her fingers into a fist.

Eve was being absurd. And her borderline-psychotic preteen spelling reflected said absurdity.

She wanted to kill her, except for when she wanted to love her, which was always, nowadays. She’d done her best to give up the killing since everything changed after the ballroom, after Konstantin left for good, after Eve turned around, and walked back, and loved back, and slowly wrapped her arms around her middle, embracing all that they were and would most likely never be. Save for the standoffish texts over the past two weeks, they’d kept in constant communication while Villanelle did her level best to reroute the Twelve for a month or so, leaving Eve to establish routine. If the Twelve were keeping tabs on Eve to get to Villanelle, they would've probably given up after a few weeks.

At least Villanelle hoped.

She and Eve had been quite careful at the outset: burner phones, payphones, non-traceable messaging apps with throwaway user names that linked back to encrypted email accounts. As long as the Twelve didn’t intercept any incoming or outgoing communications from their on-again, off-again assassin, she and Eve should be in the clear for the night. Combined with their respective skillsets, it wasn’t so far beyond the realm of possibility that they’d be able to shake the Twelve, however momentarily, but it did require them to be apart for longer than Villanelle wanted. Longer than Eve wanted, Villanelle knew, though she still struggled to admit it.

So all of that work, all of that travel, undone with a few misspelled words in a text message. Villanelle finally made it back to London after trekking about the whole of Europe to lose herself from the Twelve, and then Eve just… uninvited her? From their presumptive first date at the pub?

_Rude._

Her fingers flew over the keyboard, a host of sad-faced emojis filling her text bubbles.

_Too late, I’m already here. Did you wear something sexy?_

_Wht do u wnnntt to drinj?_

_Vodka. The good shit. None of that dry gin swill._

The three dots appeared very quickly, but her focus was split between the screen and a gentleman she thought she’d seen on the platform at Leicester Square after she’d departed from her hotel in SoHo. She waited at a light for a crossing, and the man continued on his way.

Not the same, then.

Same goatee, build, hair color, but no mole on the cheek and different trainers.

In another life, she would’ve made the distinction earlier and carried on without double-checking. But she wasn’t just double-checking for herself now.

Her phone buzzed again.

Despite Eve’s drunkenness, she’d somehow found the wherewithal to send Villanelle three middle finger emojis.

Villanelle smiled at her screen as she approached the entrance to Hafferty’s.

The pub was ordinary and old, like every other established London pub. Shellacked wood bar, split leather booths, and a ceiling dark as the sky outside. Its one unique feature was the red and blue circle of the Korean flag hanging beside the Union Jack from a center beam, drawing eyes to the bright white field amidst such a dark background of dingy walls and tabletops. On a Tuesday late the crowd was sparse, but Eve sat cross-legged and small-looking at the end of the bar near an ancient till, chatting amiably with a young man who’d just finished pouring a shot of Beluga over a few ice cubes. His smile was charming and he said something that made Eve laugh, but Villanelle did not mind so much.

She made Eve laugh a lot, now.

“Hi,” she said, sliding effortlessly into the seat beside Eve. “You are… very drunk.”

“Tell Andy he’s b-better than his past,” Eve insisted, tilting her glass of gin at the bartender, ice swooping along the rim in a precarious half-circle. “Trussssst me. She w-would know.” Eve grabbed her fingers without hesitation and something wild and warm roared through Villanelle’s gut.

“I do hope she has not been treating you poorly,” Villanelle affected the British voice with ease, the fingers of her free hand curling around her condensated glass.

“No more poorly than life itself.” Amiable Andy took his leave to attend to the other single drinkers, and Villanelle rather liked him. He seemed like one of those old souls who could tell when he was no longer wanted and didn’t have the ego to feel hurt about it. Plus, he gave her good vodka.

“He’s a good kid,” Eve said, draining her glass. “Reminds me of… K—Kenny.”

Villanelle squeezed Eve’s fingers and reveled in the closeness.

“What’s prompted drunken reminiscing? You did know I was coming. After nearly five weeks, Eve, need I remind you.”

“We should’ve jumped when we had the chance.”

Villanelle frowned.

That… was a turn. And now that Andy was gone, Eve did not seem so happy. Or, even if she was, she was too drunk to openly display her happiness, unlike the quick and clever texts and surreptitious calls they’d been logging since their respite on Tower Bridge. She’d been on the run, of course, had to be, for everyone’s safety, but contact with Eve had always been paramount. Things had felt—strange, for lack of a better word, but everything—being wanted, chosen, worried after in the way Eve did… it was so _new._ She had no template for comparison of care, so even if there had been something of a tonal shift, she’d simply… chalked it all up to the _newness_ of it all.

For Eve as well.

It wasn’t everyday you emoji-flirted with someone you’d threatened with a toilet brush, she figured. Or, perhaps more pressingly, who had shot you with an Astra Cub .22 caliber pocket pistol. 

Still, her tone was jarring because Eve had never sounded like this, defeatist in a lazy way. It seemed wholly antithetical to her insatiable quests for knowledge. And while a drunk Eve was not so uncommon, a drunk Eve seated beside Villanelle after long weeks lost to evasion and frightening honesty shared along air waves did not bode well in the realm of international intrigue. Cross-legged and scrunched on the bar stool, Eve looked… wrong. A little smaller, and greyer, as if mid-winter London had taken its wires and smog and infused Eve with a gaseous cloud of monochrome mist instead of surging, crimson blood.

Villanelle recalled Eve’s breathless confession on the bridge:

_No, I killed Dasha. I crushed her… with my foot._

She hadn’t been exactly happy about it but she’d seemed so _alive_ then.

“Hmm,” Villanelle sipped her drink and felt Eve brush her thumb over her knuckles.

The gesture was… very public. And under different circumstances, unencumbered hand-holding might’ve been more welcome, but Eve’s skin felt clammy and her eye creases were red and haggard-looking, and all Villanelle could think about was taking Eve home while she was free from the Twelve’s ominous shadow.

She’d help Eve barf her brains out on prettily patterned tile in the hotel en suite. She’d even sit with her on the chilly floor and rub the small of her back like they did in the movies. Place a towel on her forehead. Force-feed her paracetamol and waterboard her to hydrate.

The thought brought forth a surge of nostalgia, and Villanelle smiled down at Eve. She didn't seem to be paying attention to her, even though she looked amazing, and was far more interesting than even amiable Andy or the ice in her empty glass.

Oh well, back to the daydream: Villanelle would stroke Eve's hair until she woke up the next morning, ready for the brunch she’d been planning for weeks and the few stolen hours they’d have together before she needed to leave, again, always again. But not before devouring each other for the first time, getting some sort of fix to hold her over until she'd be able to make it back to London again.

Maybe… if the Twelve had called off their hounds she might chance another day. Might chance a movie, or accompanying Eve to the Bitter Pill offices, to see what progress she’d made on identifying Keepers and dirty dozen members. Slowly hunting stories of sketchy political dealings and mob bosses and market fraud was nothing, nothing compared to the sensation of the chase, Eve had once confessed by phone (Villanelle had been on a tram in Brussels, so the signal had been rather patchy). But all of her questions had been shoved to the wayside in lieu of these rambling, drunken monologues for the past two weeks and Villanelle had reveled in it: the knowing of Eve, the unfettered truth of her word-vomit.

It made Villanelle feel special.

Made her want to kill the Twelve even more, when Eve whispered about a daily routine that could morph into a date on the calendar, somewhere in the future, like shared plans and intention.

“Eve,” she said, extracting her fingers from Eve’s grip. “Let’s go.”

“No, no, ’s okay—” Eve warbled, stealing Villanelle’s vodka with far more deftness than a person as drunk as she was should exhibit. She downed it and winced. Eve’s liver bile was probably filtered to 80 proof.

Eve licked her lips, and then: “Oksana, babe, listen—”

_Babe?_

“You can’t just call me that here and expect me to—”

“Andy’ll t-take me home,” Eve insisted, pulling one knee up to prop her chin on. “’S okay, he gets me… on the bus, an—’s fine.”

Eve wouldn’t look at her. Instead, she picked the skin at the edges of the nail on her middle finger and stared at the grainy wood of the bar.

“You’re too drunk to enjoy,” Villanelle pouted, throwing a bill down on the countertop. “Why did you ruin this?”

“Everything’s ruined.” And then, hiccups. “I— _hicc!_ —I—”

“Come on,” Villanelle grumbled. “Let’s get back to the hotel.”

“No!” Eve said, curling her fingers into the bar top. “Please, n-no, just take me— _hicc_ —back to the flat. It’s not far.”

It wasn’t far, but Eve was having a hard time remaining upright (and her hiccups persisted). Villanelle would be lying to herself if she claimed she’d not had visions of carrying Eve—to bed, or across the threshold of their new home, or even out into the water of the Med on a beachy holiday, some maybe-moment far away when no crosshairs were trained on their skulls. But dragging Eve upwards of ten blocks tested the limits of even her physical prowess, so she squeezed Eve’s thigh in the back of the cab as they rocked their way home to Eve’s newest flat, small and utilitarian and just as shitty as the last one she’d broken into. 

The lift was slow, and Eve had gone silently weepy. The grey noise of pulleys and hydraulics was occasionally punctuated by a sniffle or a hiccup. Eve winced against the brightness of the halogen lights overhead.

Villanelle felt…weird.

“You do not have to cry so much because you screwed up our first date,” Villanelle chanced, tracing her pointer finger over each button on the panel. They were standing nearly a foot apart. “I am very forgiving.”

“Christ.”

“You don’t have to bring him into this.”

“Just so you know, my mom is pretty religious. It’ll have to be in a church,” Eve mumbled, wiping at her cheeks with the backs of her hands. Snot dribbled down from her nose as she sniffed and pulled her overlarge bag off of her shoulders. “Keys,” she said, indicating the void of receipts and empty croissant bags and pens and who knows what else. Villanelle rummaged through it until she heard a jingle of metal, Eve’s whispers behind her almost sounding like some little song performed just for her in the not-quite-karaoke-lift-booth.

“Are you… actually praying?”

“Thanks for the keys,” Eve said, marching off the lift and down a dingy breezeway. “You should go back to your hotel.”

“Uhm,” Villanelle stopped while Eve struggled with her keys. Her body swayed into the door jamb and Villanelle had to bite down a laugh. “No.”

Eve finally found the right key and put it in the lock. Her head fell forward onto the door, hard, but she didn’t move. Long enough for Villanelle to worry, and yet… was this the _new_ they’d both been so afraid of? Was this what it felt like to go home together, after a (disastrous) date, with one of them pissed and the other one pissed off?

“You can’t come in,” Eve whispered.

Villanelle rolled her eyes. “I’ll sleep on the floor, if—”

“It’s not that,” she said quietly, another tear falling over her cheek.

Villanelle simply waited, waited for Eve’s drawn-out explanations and her reasoning, her puzzle pieces coming together. 

Eve always had a comment for everything, so it was with great concern that Villanelle pin-pointed what seemed so unnerving about the entire evening—the quiet. Everything had seemed—so _contained_ somehow. Eve’s words, her texts, even her attitude… it was nothing so expressive and pushy as Eve’s normal.

God, that fucking word.

“What is wrong?” Villanelle asked, perhaps thirty minutes too late. Eve had known instantly when something was wrong with her, which was why Eve would always be better than she was. She’d been so much slower on the uptake, had merely thought Eve was drunk.

“Was this— _hicc!_ —a date?”

“As much of a date as we can have while I’m shaking hitmen on the continent.”

“Okay,” Eve said, her blue anorak drooping off of one shoulder. “Then I’m breaking up with you.”

“Is this some kind of test?” Villanelle asked. “Do you want me to break into your apartment instead? Like old times?” Eve hiccuped again and Villanelle crowded her. “Is it like a role-play thing?”

“Can you slap me again?”

“Shit, that’s kinkier than I thought you’d—”

“For the _hicc!_ -hiccups, you idiot,” Eve said, and Villanelle was momentarily relieved. An insult meant Eve was coming back to herself. But her last slap had been in Rome and… they didn’t really talk about Rome.

Eve sighed and relented, twisting the key in its place to open the door. She immediately turned left for the loo while Villanelle took her time, meandering down the entryway and into a large room that could’ve served as a cheap motel suite. The kitchen was more kitchenette and the living-slash-sleeping quarters were more liminal space than cozy home; the drabness of it all had her teetering between annoyance and anger. At least in the last place there was some of Eve on the walls, the end tables, the fridge, the shelves. She didn’t see files or books or pictures or empty UCONN mugs. Just ash in a glass tray and empty Seagram’s bottles scattered about the place. Villanelle heard Eve gag through the wall as wet sick splashed on porcelain.

On the ugly laminate pattern of the kitchen sat a clump of something dark and stringy, like an overgrown dust bunny that had mutated into a grotesque domestic tumbleweed. Dishes were piled up in the sink and take-out containers overran the trash bin. The bar separating the kitchen from the living area was littered with mailed packets of manilla envelopes piled high and unopened, taking up enough space to pique Villanelle’s curiosity. Return addresses were stamped in the corners from an NHS site in central London, and two hospitals on the south side. The retching continued, but as Villanelle turned toward the bathroom, the calendar stuck on the refrigerator stopped her in her tracks.

Written in the little squares, spaced out over the course of several weeks, was the word _TREATMENT_. It had been scrawled in all caps, with marker the color of blood, accompanied by times, room numbers, and a little arrow drawn off to the side, pointing toward a card advertising a cab service underneath a blue magnet. Above the calendar was a pamphlet flapping from a clip on the handle of the freezer titled:

**_Living with Stage Four—_ **

Another splash of sour stomach acid pulled her away from the kitchen and into the bathroom, where more of the mutant dust bunnies lived in the corners behind the door, in piles in the shower, on the hairbrush by the sink.

“…Eve?”

Villanelle moved to pull Eve’s hair back as she retched into the toilet again and again, tears springing to her eyes as a cluster of strands freed themselves from Eve’s scalp with little resistance.

“No…” Villanelle murmured, rubbing the small of Eve’s back as she laid her cheek against the toilet seat, too weary to keep heaving.

Villanelle pulled that gorgeous mass of dark curls over her forehead, behind her ears, and more wavy locks slipped between her fingers as Eve grimaced, tears trickling sideways across her ashen face.

“No, no—I—” More tears fell and Eve’s cheek twitched as she flapped her arm up for the flush handle. Villanelle caught her hand and pressed a kiss to it, tasted salt. “No, Eve… please—”

“S-sorry… baby,” Eve mumbled, then retched one final time before passing out on the bathroom floor.

* * *

Villanelle felt like the elephant was crushing her, the one with the English phrase in the room that they didn’t discuss. She had imagined in brighter moments, her and Eve on safari maybe, or hiking volcanoes, whale-watching on north-bound cruises. Thailand. Statues. Jungles. Elephants bathing in rivers and setting poisonous snakes after anyone trying to take them out.

But this elephant was not in Thailand. It wasn’t on the nature documentaries they watched together yet separately, staying on the phone for hours on end with each other while Eve poured herself into her research and Villanelle remained incognito in Prague, psyching herself up for only twelve more, then eleven more, then ten… until she didn’t have to do it again. Planet Earth was easy, mindless, and it showed Villanelle that there was so much more to see beyond where she’d been already. India could be fun. Or Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco.

_Play it again, Sam._

She’d put it in their Netflix queue.

She watched as a crocodile dragged some flightless bird underneath the water and rolled until its neck snapped, vowing to take Eve to the big zoo with the feeding demonstrations and the family with all the khaki. As long as she could get rid of the elephant first, more proverbial menace in the sense that it was always there, crushing them both, even if she and Eve avoided discussing it just like they avoided discussing the future.

When Villanelle wasn’t orchestrating accidents for powerful members of their dirty-dozen crime syndicate on the mainland and Eve wasn’t elbow-deep in fatigue or files, they were, as often as they could be, together.

But they didn’t talk about it.

Except for when Eve was drunk, which was happening more and more when Villanelle was able to meet with her, usually at Haverty’s. Andy and his commiserating smile somehow comforted them despite their tragedy.

When she got drunk she made cancer jokes.

_Can you believe it was my junk? Thank god we never fucked before all of this, then you’d really feel like shit._

And Villanelle pretended that didn’t hurt her as much as the time Eve called her a psychopath, or told her she didn’t know what love meant, or stopped texting her for days on end while she was away, still killing for them even though she didn’t want to anymore. She felt robbed of the chance to know Eve that way, because she never could stay long enough and all of Eve’s otherwise limited energy was spent on tracking and mental gymnastics that manifested in physical exhaustion. Devoid of spirit, Eve would kiss her if she was feeling generous, and smile wetly whenever she brought a trembling hand to her chest to stop anything from going further. It had not happened many times, and Villanelle was sick with longing. But any woman on the streets of Prague would feel wrong this time, no matter what Eve had told her on one of the rare occasions she got to hold her as they dozed.

_Hey, uhm… you could go pick somebody up if you… uhm… wanted to fuck someone, you know._

_Fucking isn’t exactly a physiological need._

_Neither is Van Noten._

_Might have to edit that Wikipedia article on Maslow again._

_I just mean… it’s okay if you want to fuck someone, though. You’re twenty-seven, your libido is probably in hyperdrive._

_Twenty-eight._

_What?_

_My birthday was last month._

_What? No—fuck, I missed it._

_You gave me Nine, so it was alright, I guess._

_I’m sorry._

_Don’t be sorry… if you want, I’ll go throw the fish you cooked for dinner out the window to call it even._

Always after treatments things got quiet, until one of them saw something funny and texted a photo to the other, or Eve finally felt strong enough to ask an off-the-wall question like:

_Did you kill a middle-weight Russian wrestler in prison by biting her throat? Like Jack Bauer?_

_Uhm… no?_

_Does the name ‘Inga’ ring a bell?_

_Oh, yeah… solitary confinement was not so solitary. I did not get to sleep much._

_That is wild._

_Who is Jack Bauer?_

_God, how old were you in 2001?_

_…do you really want to know?_

_I’m sure I’ll wake up in night sweats after my subconscious does the math. Gives a whole new meaning to ‘sorry baby’._

_You’re not old, Eve._

_Tell that to the ghost of my uterus._

On the nights she switched to wine Eve didn’t fear terms like _radical hysterectomy_ or _radiation_ or _chemotherapy._ The phrases were just a series of elephants on parade they didn’t talk about in the light of day, but insecurities were easier to confess when accompanied by darkness and cabernet.

“I’m really sorry about the hair,” Eve slurred one night when they were playing Scrabble at her coffee table. She wore turtlenecks even more now, dark navy and maroon peeking out from underneath a fluffy robe Villanelle had gifted her just because. ‘Just because’ she was cold all the time, now. She’d gotten really good at slipping a scarf over her forehead and tying it tight, no longer pulling a face of disgust when she caught her reflection in the mirror. But Eve still lifted her hands up around her head and framed her face, some sort of muscle-memory to pull back a full head of hair that was no longer there.

“What?” Villanelle asked, playing ‘ _chutzpah_ ’ for a whopping 77 points. “What do you mean?”

“It’s the only thing that made me pretty for you.”

“Eve—”

“Fuck, _chutzpah_ ,” Eve interrupted, realizing that she’d glanced toward the elephant… and that made her vulnerable. “I’m not playing Scrabble anymore. You speak too many languages.”

“Not Yiddish,” Villanelle acquiesced.

“Yeah, well… no more Italian words unless it’s something you can get at a diner.”

“So, _lasagna_ but not _prosciutto_?”

“You don’t get enough tiles to spell prosciutto, but yeah, sure,” Eve said, her brow furrowed in concentration, her clavicle poking out even beneath the thick ribbing of the sweater.

She was getting skinnier by the week.

Villanelle crawled across the floor and tilted Eve’s chin away from the board.

“What—”

“You’re beautiful,” Villanelle said, and kissed her softly. “Your hair was beautiful, too, but I didn’t turn around for your hair, Eve.”

The elephant took a step closer. Villanelle felt its trunk wrap round her trachea.

“Don’t be nice," Eve whispered. "Please.”

“Why not?”

“It’ll be harder for you when…”

“It’s not hard now, and now is where we are,” Villanelle said, ignoring the trumpeting. “What is hard, is watching you struggle through a game that you are very bad at.”

Another deflection, and the elephant went back to its corner.

“Fuck you,” Eve swatted at her shoulder as Villanelle pulled her close to cuddle beneath her arm. Her head fell back on the cushion of the sofa and Eve’s head rested against her shoulder. “You want to watch Casablanca?”

“I’m going to take you to Marrakesh, one day.”

“I'm sure you'd use the opportunity to go and buy an insanely expensive trench coat,” Eve mumbled.

They chatted about the movie for the rest of the evening. Eventually, Ingrid Bergman flew away on a propeller plane, and then:

“I want a flattering funeral photo,” Eve said, half asleep. The elephant picked up its massive foot and pressed against Villanelle's chest. “Not the one they used when we put out the hit on me. I was really hungover that morning.”

"Flattering funeral photo," Villanelle said, echoing Eve from ages past. "Got it."

The elephant stayed there, crushing them both.

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

Villanelle didn’t drive Eve to appointments and she didn’t make her take her medicine and she didn’t help her change her clothes. She’d have to be in London regularly for that, would have to be dating Eve and in love with Eve in a way that wasn’t so dangerous; she’d have to be supportive and helpful to Eve in ways someone like the Mustache could’ve been if everything had been different a year ago.

_You don’t have to keep coming back, you know. You never signed up for this._

_I tried walking away once. We both did._

_That was before._

_Not before it was too late, though._

Villanelle did a lot of research in her downtime while she and Eve didn’t talk about it. Free radicals and white blood cells and homeopathic everything, documentaries and peer reviews and clinical trials and peyote. She read a book about a couple who trekked the South West Coastal Path, zigging and zagging along the jagged edges of Cornwall, curing the husband’s degenerative disease through fresh air and illegal camping and poor nutrition and walking and walking and walking and walking because they were not being chased by murderous lunatics who wanted to take over the world. Villanelle wished she and Eve could set out on a pilgrimage, emerge whole and unencumbered on the final hill crest.

She watched a documentary on grounding, and wondered if the electrical pulses in the earth would be enough to jumpstart healing for them both; if Eve would call her crazy when she asked her to take her shoes off in Hampton Court Park and wiggle her toes in the mud. She’d floated the idea past Andy, who’d called it all a little _woo-woo_ , in his expert scientific opinion, despite the bound medical journals Villanelle had extracted from her bag. She quickly hid them once Eve arrived at Haverty's, still sober enough to deliver the newest file on dirty-dozen member Number Five, who was currently holed up in Oslo.

“I’ve only been to Norway once,” she said.

“I’m sorry the second time has to be a work trip.”

“We can go one day,” Villanelle chanced. “Go see that emoji.”

“You mean ‘The Scream’?”

Villanelle slapped both palms to her face and dropped her jaw, opening her eyes comically wide.

“You don’t even like museums.”

“I like emojis,” Villanelle retorted, brightening a little at Eve’s grin. “Hey, would you… want to go for a walk?”

She knew that if they stayed at Haverty’s she’d end up carrying Eve home in a cab, and that if she got her back to the flat too soon Eve would crack open a bottle of wine and go to sleep a lot quicker than Villanelle wanted. She hated that Eve still had to clock into work everyday, but Eve insisted, begged her not to come into the office so as not to distract her. Time, and the elephant with the wristwatch that they never talked about, was so, _so_ pressing. And Eve needed every remaining brain cell laser-focused on the remaining members of the Twelve. Even having Villanelle swing by to bring her lunch was out of the question.

Villanelle would come to find out that Eve had to take naps on her lunch break because she was often tired and not very hungry; she’d once exited the lift and bumped into Jamie who told her that Eve was in a bad way, that Audrey was looking after her in the ladies.

_Where are you going?_

_Pfft._

_Villanelle._

_What?!_

_I don’t think she wants you to see her like that._

_Can you… can you at least give her this?_ Villanelle had immediately felt stupid, but it was just a plain ham sandwich and salted crisps and an orange, because Vitamin C was important but intense flavors weren’t always necessary because of the whole no-appetite and loss-of-taste thing, and _holy shit_ Eve was _dying_ —

_Yeah_ , Jamie had said, solicitously. _I’ll make sure she gets it._

Back at the bar, in the present, Villanelle caught her own reflection in the mirror behind the multicolored bottles. Andy was eyeing the pair over a dish rag and a glass, waiting for Eve’s reply.

“Uhm, yeah, I… yeah, we can go get some fresh air,” Eve agreed to Villanelle’s proposition.

“We won’t go too far. Just… might be good for you to get out for a bit.”

“Okay.”

“Andy?”

“You’re good,” Andy said, sliding the gin and soda he’d already started over toward the till.

He kept his cell, his water cup, and his keys in a little cubby hole there, Villanelle had noticed. A bad spot for a drunken lout with sticky fingers; a fine spot for a regular old grad student navigating his way through a shift. He wasn’t exceptionally bright, but he was kind. Eve needed that more and more these days.

Villanelle offered Andy a genuine smile as they exited, and he smiled back. The interaction felt... true.

London in the spring should’ve been nicer. In the movie montages she’d seen, blossoms and window boxes and toddlers splashing through puddles ran rampant. But tonight, Villanelle saw the plume of her breath on the wind, and turned toward a tiny Eve, who’d yanked her hood with the fur trim over head and buried her hands beneath her armpits, out of Villanelle’s reach. Eve had to take two steps for every stride of Villanelle’s so she adjusted, then adjusted again. Eve was already breathing heavily and they hadn’t even made it three blocks.

“Let’s sit,” Villanelle offered, casting her glance overhead.

It’s not like she expected stars at nighttime, not with smog and low-hanging clouds. Hoped, maybe. Eve had engendered a lot of hope as of late, and Villanelle was learning that hope was perhaps a worse feeling than boredom.

Boredom was a familiar beast. There were quick fixes for it. Like picking up young, blonde, too-eager Czech women who reminded her nothing of Eve, and fucking their brains out. She couldn’t shop in Prague, not like she once had, but she could rearrange her flat until she’d tried every configuration of couch-wardrobe-bed-table-chair she could find, and cause enough of a noisy stir in the building to gain a reputation for scraping fine oak spindles against floorboards. When she explained, she was commissioned, apartment by apartment, to feng shui every single flat in her building.

It was almost like interior design, when they gave her cash to go and buy paintings, or tchotchkes, or light fixtures. And everything was less expensive than they assumed, so Villanelle would skim a little off the top, forge a hand-written receipt from a very exclusive shop, and then go find the clothes and the perfumes and the meals that had made her so happy for so long, a brilliant little con to pass the time between seeing Eve and killing the Twelve.

One day, at her apartment in Prague, she was fork-deep in a gourmet cake, and she just started crying.

She cried for nine hours.

“I’ve been crying more,” Villanelle said, as she and Eve sat on the bus bench, back in London, for however long she thought she could stay this time.

“Same,” Eve said.

Something big and grey shifted in the shadows behind them.

“I slept with someone.”

“How was it?”

“Shit,” Villanelle confessed. “It was shit before, I just didn’t realize it. This… this was different.”

“Sorry.”

Villanelle almost smiled. “You weren’t the one screwing me.”

“Aren’t I, though?” Eve asked, and Villanelle hated her little bitter truths. “I wish you weren’t in love with me. Makes things harder.”

“Aren’t we quite confident with ourselves this evening,” Villanelle said, a chuckle falling flat because of how absurdly accurate Eve was. She’d known, had always known Villanelle. Every inch of her, even the bits she still had questions about, Eve could intuit. She was just that good, or that obsessed, or that clever, or beautiful or dying or brilliant or dying or weak or _dying-dying-dying_ —

“Call Andy,” Eve said. “After you finish with the Twelve. He’ll set you up.”

“I do make a mean French 75.”

Eve turned to her, eyes watery and fathomless. “He’ll take care of you.”

“I don’t need taking care of.”

Eve reached a bare hand up toward Villanelle’s cheek. She laid her palm there, warm from being tucked beneath her jacket cuff, her fingers applying the slightest pressure to the dip where her temple met the wide loop of her cheekbone. “Of course you do,” she said, and pulled Villanelle in to kiss her. 

Her jaw trembled as she pulled away, but Eve’s hand never faltered, stroking down the side of her face.

“I feel like I should be apologizing for something,” Eve whispered.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Feelings are stupid,” Villanelle said, blinking and twisting away quickly, flagging down a bus as it coasted before them.

“Take me home?”

Villanelle nodded, and helped her onto the bus.

They were two blocks away from Eve’s flat when the asshole knicked Eve’s bicep with the knife. Villanelle had broken his wrist in the ensuing aftermath, but not before he’d gotten in several gut shots, and one disorienting blow to the side of her head while her eyes were trained on the knife. Her nose was bleeding. So was her lip.

There was a loud _bang!_ near her head, and Villanelle wondered if she was finally bleeding out of her ear, and if Eve would meet her shortly, somewhere away from grey London asphalt where stars seemed determined to hide from them.

“Jesus!” Eve whimpered, crouching against the brick and gripping tightly against her arm. Straining to rise, Villanelle made some intelligible sounds as Eve pulled her hand away from her wound, red and dark beyond the glow of the streetlights.

“Phone, give me your—Eve—”

“Give me a second!” she snapped, fumbling with her left hand for the device and hardly able to tap at the buttons.

“Give me the—”

“I got it!” she insisted. “Fucking, I got—Carolyn! Hey, Caro—it’s Eve. We’ve need a clean-up team.”

Villanelle is halfway to asking _why do we need a clean-up team?_ when she turns to her left and sees blood and brain matter draining from a mid-sized man who is lying on the ground with a hole in his head because Eve had just shot him point-blank.

“Yeah, off Rodney Circle and—okay, okay, yeah. Thanks.”

Eve was on her knees at Villanelle’s level so quickly it made her head spin. “Are you okay?”

“I’m…” Villanelle looked back at the body, crooked and heavy behind a small black sedan, and somehow, in some far-away part of her brain, Villanelle registered the fluttering of a curtain backlit with lamplight from three buildings down, third story, second to last apartment on the left.

“We need to move the body,” she grunted, shaking her head as she moved up on all fours.

It was twelve minutes exactly before Eve flagged down an unmarked van with a spiraling yellow light on top of its hood; two hours and seventeen minutes before she and Eve parted ways in the private hospital in Brixton; and four hours and thirty-two minutes before the pair of them were ensconced in an elaborate hotel suite on the north side that Villanelle paid for out-of-pocket, because Eve now had stitches in her arm and a jagged scar to match, just like Villanelle did. Eve was so tired she could barely make it from the lobby to the lift.

"Don’t you fucking dare."

"It’s romantic."

"We’ve just been to hospital. There is nothing romantic about this."

"If you’d stop squirming, it would be."

And so Eve capitulated, despite many verbal protests, and allowed Villanelle to carry her to their room and place her on their bed, strip her of the clothes she’d been in all day and snuggle into her warmth as Villanelle wrapped her body around her from behind. Before lying down properly, Villanelle made Eve swallow a pain killer for the three-inch cut that nearly severed her brachial artery.

“You have dried blood on your lip,” Eve whispered in the dark.

“You can’t see.”

“Smells like iron. I know hospital smells now. You need to go clean up.”

Villanelle didn’t want to clean up. She didn’t want to go into MI6 at first light, and report to Carolyn about the attack, and how the remaining members of the Twelve knew about her and Eve, and where Eve lived, and where they went when they were together. Because that meant more meaningless fucks in Prague and dragging couches against center walls with egg-dart pattern moldings and hand-crafted wainscoting for the rest of her life and no more Eve.

Villanelle knelt at the edge of the bed and turned on the lamp, saw the deep circles underneath Eve’s eyes and how her cheeks had gone concave. She looked so tired, and Villanelle hated to do it to her, but she had to know—

“Why did you have a gun, Eve?”

She placed her fingertips on Eve’s face, and brushed her thumb over the arch where her eyebrow used to be.

Eve didn’t open her eyes.

“Because I’m not going out like a pussy,” Eve grumbled, using the last bit of her strength to roll over, leaving Villanelle in shadowed lamplight, trembling.

* * *

Villanelle killed Five, Four, and Three in quick succession. Five and Four happened to be together when she made her move, and their faces looked just like the harried emoji by the time Villanelle was done with them. Three had opted for the untraceable rustic life on Inis Mór, donning Aran sweaters and deciding a retirement consisting of driving tourist buggies about a rocky island on the edge of the Atlantic was better than life in a cell, but Eve tracked him nonetheless.

Eve tracked, Villanelle dispatched.

They were like a girl group.

After a bit of digging on Carolyn’s end, it came to light that Villanelle was not in fact the target of the knife attack in New Malden, but Eve, who had been moved to a safe house somewhere in the outskirts of Ipswich. Turns out, it does not take a special person to kill—people will do most anything for money. But the tracing? God, you had to be brilliant.

Only two members of the Twelve left, and now at the safe house…

Eve had been taken away from most of her resources.

Too bad for the Twelve, Eve was still rather brilliant.

Her treatments continued, or so Villanelle was told, in encrypted, sterile emails that asked after her well-being and didn’t let on that Eve’s condition was worsening by the day, such that she’d taken to Googling hospice services more and more. Villanelle came across said information with a passing threat issued towards Bear, who would jump or crawl or Macarena if Villanelle so desired, if only to not have his penis pickled. The night Bear delivered the news, Villanelle found a girl and a club and a mild dosage of E that left her floating for half a night, before waking up to an empty bed and a puddle of vomit that was mostly liquor.

Villanelle had hoped Konstantin wouldn’t die from a heart attack. She had hoped he wouldn’t leave her. Yet here she was, growing rather accustomed to losing in the ways that mattered. Even in Prague, everything was grey, but the monochrome doldrums that accompanied her special sort of fatalism brightened and sharpened ever so slightly when she was with Eve.

She was tired of hoping and tired of grey and tired of failing in her attempts to cope.

So Villanelle, now with black hair and a bone-white stripe at her temple, a fake skull neck tattoo, Dock Martens, and chains around her waist, decided to go off to Ipswich for holiday. Because she couldn’t stay away, and she couldn’t stop hoping.

And because Eve had Two ready for her.

“What the fuck?”

“You like it?” Villanelle asked, sliding into Eve’s semi-detached without invitation. She dropped a duffle bag at the entrance and twirled through the front hallway. “The mini-skirt is phenomenal.”

Eve leaned her shoulder against the wall, taking her in from toe to wig-covered head. “Bend over, let me get a good look.”

“Eve!” Villanelle said, delighted. “And here I thought you’d be mad at me.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m pissed,” Eve said, trudging back to the kitchen and grabbing a bottle of something along the way. “You’re not supposed to come see me. I was going to post these to Jamie.”

“Well,” Villanelle said, sauntering into the living room. “I’m rather in love with you, I think it gives me an excuse.” She said it very casually, and plopped down on the sofa beside Eve, as if the words in that order hadn’t been emitted for the first time (the first _real_ time), as if the implication hadn’t been acknowledged before, despite Eve’s frailty. “Shall we see what Honey and Toto are up to on the nature show reruns?”

“Villanelle.”

“How do you work your remote?” Villanelle pressed, torn between two devices on the coffee table before the small television, neither labeled, neither modern, and it occurred to her that Eve might have something as god-awful as cable in the safe house, instead of streaming services.

Eve moved towards her and her lips quirked upwards, finally sure of herself. She placed a file on the coffee table and tilted Villanelle’s chin down, and kissed her. She pulled the long black wig off and tossed it on the coffee table.

“Sit,” she managed, and they both plopped on the couch.

“Hold me?” Villanelle asked, and Eve didn’t argue. “Two?” she said.

“Yep.”

“Where?”

“Montenegro.”

“Ugh, mountains.”

“I’m sorry,” Eve said sarcastically. “Mountains and valleys and seas not exotic enough for you?”

Villanelle shrugged, and placed her fingers over Eve’s, which were resting on her elbows. “I wish you could come.”

“Me, too.”

“I know.”

“Villanelle,” Eve whispered, close and hot at the nape of her neck, “I’m not getting better.”

“I know that, too,” Villanelle said, squeezing her eyes shut. Hope was hot at her lids, and wet and thick in her throat. “It is still not fun.”

“Huh?”

“Loving people,” she said. “Especially when they can leave so easily.”

“It’s not like I want to go.”

“I know. But we’ll never get to know how you might’ve felt without this hanging over our heads,” Villanelle sighed, and pulled a blanket down on them. She readjusted so she could look Eve in the eye. “I wonder if you would have found them all if you did not feel as if you had a deadline.”

“Death is a spectacular motivator.”

“Bear said you were researching hospice care.”

“I have been,” Eve said. “Mornings are hard now. I have to nap like… all the time. And it’s tough keeping food down.”

Villanelle picked at the edges of the blanket for something to do with her hands, but she didn’t look away from Eve. Not when she didn’t know if tonight would be the last night to stare until her eyes hurt, until she’d drunk her fill of pore and crinkle and skin tone. Villanelle gazed at her, and loved her, really fucking hard.

“We’re talking about it,” she smiled.

“Look at us,” Eve said, smiling back. “A couple of adults.”

“Anybody you’d want me to… call?”

“Nah,” Eve said. “I’ve burned a lot of bridges, looking for you.”

“Not Tower Bridge.”

“Pretty sure I’d be shot on site if I tried to set fire to it.”

Villanelle felt a tear roll over her cheek as Eve reached for her hand, threading their fingers together. Another kiss, and another stolen moment, before Villanelle had to jet back to Europe and get rid of the other guillotine hovering just out of sight.

“It’s not even that I love you,” Villanelle said, thoughtfully. “I just… I would do anything for you. Absolutely anything. I think I would kill you, if you asked me to.”

Eve stared down at her from her prop on the cushion, the hollows under her eyes so dark in the shadows they reminded Villanelle of a placard she’d half paid attention to in Amsterdam, with the bacon men. Distilled light, making the flat come alive. _Chiaroscuro_. Eve seemed to be shrinking down to two dimensions, like a cartoon pressed against paper—she was so, so skinny.

“How much do you weigh?” Villanelle asked.

“V, don’t—”

“How much?”

“…ninety-two pounds,” Eve said, pulling off the scarf covering her bare head. Tiny black hairs were spurting out of her skull, like a Chia pet with fungus.

Villanelle looked at the soft fuzz, but couldn’t bring herself to touch it. “Eve—”

“No more treatments,” Eve said.

“Eve,” Villanelle repeated. “I—”

“It’s okay,” she said, lips tilted, resigned, and yet… _and yet_. “Once upon a time, I would’ve never dreamed of asking you to kill me. I kinda fought you off, or—like to imagine I did.”

Villanelle brought Eve’s fingers to her lips, and kissed the back of her hand. “… and now?”

“I would never put that on you.” Eve placed her lips against Villanelle’s forehead. “Even if it was easier if I didn’t see it coming, it wouldn’t… be fair to you. You don’t even want to finish off the Twelve.”

“Well,” Villanelle said, shrugging. “There’s no champagne and biscuits between us anymore.”

“What?”

Villanelle shook her head. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Tell me again,” Eve mumbled, her thumb stroking over the back of Villanelle’s long fingers. “Tell me so I can say it back.”

Villanelle liked to think she had perfect control over her face, but sometimes things shifted. Her pout was genuine, and the little furrows in the middle of her forehead scrunched up and down like the mountains and valleys of Montenegro. She didn’t want it this way.

“Don’t say it just because you feel—”

Eve kissed her before she could argue, and the three weeks between them melted like winter frost into spring thaw. It was August now, so the metaphor wasn’t the most apt, but it reminded Villanelle of the first talk she’d had with Eve the morning after she’d upchucked in her toilet in that fucking dumpster pile of a flat:

_They’re giving me about a year, with shit—really aggressive treatment. Surgery, too. Maybe sixteen months. It’s spread pretty badly, but we’ll fight it. In the meantime, we’ve got a lot of work to do._

There was a bit of heat to this kiss; nothing like what Eve might’ve done at her healthiest, most stubborn self, but Villanelle felt fingers weaving through the back of her hair and a knee pressing between her legs.

“Eve—”

Eve stuck her tongue down Villanelle’s throat until she moaned a little, and all that hot hope transmuted to a sensuality Eve had been so against for so long.

Eve’s fingers, so skinny they were almost skeletal, clawed at Villanelle’s waistband.

“What are you doing?”

“Let me touch you.”

“No,” Villanelle shook her head. “No, Eve.”

“Please?” she asked, and of course Villanelle would relent. She’d just said she’d give Eve anything she wanted, even if the last sense memory would be lacking in so many ways. Villanelle pushed her doubts to the back of her mind and kissed her hard to forget. She yanked up the miniskirt and took whatever Eve was willing to give. Lips slotted together and breaths came heavily as she mumbled _I love you_ into Eve’s mouth.

Eve said, “I love you, too,” and pressed inside of her.

* * *

She was trying to find her trousers at 4am when Eve woke, clothes still stubbornly clinging to a frame shrunk tenfold, in Villanelle’s perception, even if it wasn’t quite that bad.

_Ninety-two pounds. Fuck._

“Early flight?” Eve asked.

“No.”

“Can you stay?”

“No.”

“… do they know where we are?”

“No.”

“Then why are you—”

“I can’t,” she murmured, glancing all the way down to Eve’s toenails, curled in the short fringe of the grey rug under the bed. She looked at the scar on Eve’s arm and tried not to compare it to her own from Romania, tried not to think about the line over her shoulder blade that she’d kissed every night they had lain together, or the matching one on the left side of her abdomen. “I love you, but you're not letting me be with you when it matters.”

“You know it’s not you,” Eve said. “They’ll find you. Us. They’ll come after—”

“Then let them!” Villanelle insisted. “Let them come. You’ve given up on treatment and I don’t want to keep running anymore. I’m tired of women who aren’t you and moving furniture and trying to stay one step ahead of someone who wants to put a bullet through my brain. I can't keep watching you... just... _shrink_ , and refuse to make it easier on yourself. So let me stay with you, for real, or I’m walking out the door and …next time I won’t come back."

Her chest heaved, and the tears shined electric blue from the glow of the bedside clock.

Villanelle was on her knees now. She didn’t remember falling, didn’t remember wrapping her arms around Eve’s waist, didn’t remember choking back tears.

"I... I can’t keep loving you in halves.”

"Oksana--"

“Please.”

“Baby…”

“ _Please!_ ”

"You can stay," Eve breathed. "After Montenegro, you can come back and stay, if that's what you want."

Eve kneeled, under immense duress, and kissed Villanelle again. And when Villanelle touched her this time, Eve didn’t stop her.

How could she?

They were both stupidly in love, and they would break for it.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this got a little longer than anticipated, but next chapter will be the last. and i mean, it's sad. fair warning. there's no hail mary happy endings here.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: major character death(s)

Eve killed herself the night that she gave Villanelle the file on number One.

“She’s in Amadora.”

“Where?”

“Suburb outside of Lisbon,” Eve explained, handing over the dossier. “The last remaining original member. Other folks have tried to fill open positions in the months you’ve been active—”

“Honestly, we can thank whatever intelligence entities took out Eight and Six and their little minions. I know Interpol isn’t always organized, but the snipers for those two—”

“Focus,” Eve said, flicking her finger across the track pad on her laptop. “Her name is—”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Nah, because I’m taking you to Morocco after the job.”

“Public servant salary, Villanelle.”

“I’ve got stashes,” Villanelle winked. “You don’t know all of my secrets.”

Eve smiled weakly. “Of course I do. I just let you think you’ve still got some. Keeps everything fresh.”

“As if the killing and the cancer didn’t already."

Losing Eve at some unknowable date in the future had certainly brought out the lovebug in Villanelle; after a fight and a crying jag that first night in Ipswich, Villanelle never went back to Prague. She spent two weeks with Eve, rising, helping her dress, reminding her to feed herself, and taking a bottle or two away from her loose grip.

Eve had stopped drinking heavily, which… well, they didn’t really talk about it.

But all of that mundanity had Villanelle thriving—she was the queen of domestic romance and care, if only for a couple of weeks. Bubble baths and rose petals, champagne and chocolates and three hours preparing Korean food that Eve could make better and that she couldn’t even really taste; Villanelle ordered a stargazing toy and set it up in their bedroom, found a recording of outdoor sounds and laid a blanket on the floor and threw pillows down for Eve as they gazed at the ceiling, thinking of cool, open meadows and scared solitude. She carved _OA + EP_ into the coffee table leg with a steak knife, and had gotten a smack to the head for her efforts.

But the night before Eve died was her best work yet.

_Is that a record player? Eve asked._

_It’s great, isn’t it?_

_Where did you even find that?_

_I got it from Bobby._

_Who is Bobby?_

_Your neighbor._

_Does he know you got it from him?_

_I do not think so, but it will teach him a lesson about leaving his windows open._

Eve just shrugged. _Oksana Astankova, globe-trotting assassin turned petty Ipswich thief._

_You’ve really done a number on me, Polastri._

She’d donned her best suit and rocked Eve in place, holding on for as long as Eve could stand and cradling her for longer afterwards. The music was instrumental, with tinkling piano keys, slow, low brass and some romantic strings. Eve was really just a tired body hanging upright in Villanelle’s grasp by the time the record played itself out, but it’s not like Villanelle had much trouble maneuvering her in her arms.

Eve only weighed eighty-eight pounds.

They went to bed at a decent hour but Eve was slower to get up these days; she didn’t hand over the file until Villanelle was perched by the countertop, preparing fold-over sandwiches for lunch.

“Carolyn's already arranged your flight details,” Eve said, staring at the notes scattered over her tabletop. Villanelle placed a plate in front of her and Eve ignored it. “You’ll go tonight.”

“So soon?”

“We don’t want her to move,” Eve insisted. “Last one, though,” she said, taking a single crisp from the plate and chewing on it, more for Villanelle’s sake than her own. “Then Morocco, or whatever.”

“Think of the sunsets,” Villanelle said. She pictured a remote villa near the river, with the night sky reflecting off the water. “Imagine the stars.”

Eve squinted at her and shook her head fondly, turning to the second to last page in the file. “She has security. Shitloads, even more than the last two. They're all extremely on edge and--”

“Not a problem.”

“Be careful,” Eve said seriously, using what little strength she had to grip Villanelle's free hand across the table.

“Of course,” Villanelle said, squeezing back. She took a large mouthful of turkey and cheese, tilting her head toward Eve in confusion.

“I love you.”

Villanelle kept chewing around her too-big bite, swallowing against the pressure to respond. “I love you, too.”

Villanelle should’ve known something was different, then.

Eve never said _I love you_ first.

* * *

Two days later, at half seven in the morning, Villanelle deboarded her return flight at Heathrow.

Carolyn was standing like a specter at arrivals, outfitted in a navy suit with a grim look on her face.

“That’s the last of them, then?”

Villanelle nodded.

“Very good,” she clipped, then turned on her booted heel. “With me, please.”

They were in the back of an unmarked black sedan, presumably on their way to MI6 to fudge a report, when Carolyn dropped her bomb: “Eve is dead.”

Villanelle flicked the window button at her side with her fingers, but didn’t turn towards her or the stupid words in the stupid car that was taking her to stupid MI6. Her breath didn’t catch, and she didn’t burst into tears and she didn’t clamber over the center console to yank the wheel away from the driver and send them careening into oncoming traffic. Instead, she released the window button and said, “Oh?”

“Yes. Just after you left, I’m afraid.”

“Hmm,” Villanelle said. “That’s… a little strange. She was not exactly strong the night before, but we—”

“Eve killed herself,” Carolyn clarified, and that made Villanelle clamp down on her words and grind her teeth. “Are you alright?”

“Absolutely not,” Villanelle replied evenly. “Where are we going?”

“MI6 took the liberty of sweeping the safe house after she—after. We’ll go to the office and you can go through her belongings. See if there is anything that you wish to keep, before we turn it over to her family.”

Villanelle sneered. "Not Niko?”

“No, her mother,” Carolyn said. “Currently residing in an assisted centre in Chiswick. I don’t imagine she’ll have much room for Eve’s personal effects.”

Villanelle thought about Eve's turtlenecks, and her files, and her journals and notes and books. All gory and glorious and nothing a little old lady from Chiswick would want adorning her cubby in an old folks' home.

“It wasn’t the gun, was it?”

“What?”

“When she killed herself,” Villanelle said softly. “I took her gun away.”

A vision of Anna flashed into her mind’s eye, inky blood and brain matter pooling beneath her skull on the hardwood of that apartment, Irina standing idly by and breathing through her mouth like an imbecile. She felt so far removed from Anna when it all happened, and so close to Eve, _Eve_ , who she wasn’t there for, who knew her better than to keep her around when her soul pooled inward and flickered away. Eve who, at her core, was a decent person. Extreme measures were never off the table when there was a job to do, but Eve deserved… something a little more dignified than a blast of metal through her skull.

“No,” Carolyn said, discreetly placing a package of tissues into the cup holder of the arm rest that separated them in the back seat. "No gun."

“How?”

Carolyn looked out the window for a moment, and Villanelle noted her drawn expression. “She was, perhaps, the best investigator I have worked with in the latter half of my career. The most dogged, certainly.”

“Carolyn,” Villanelle checked her, because she really did not believe that either of them were the type of women to get weepy in the back of a too-small car on the way to a government office. “How?”

“She sliced her femoral artery with a razor blade,” Carolyn said. “Texted for a clean-up crew before she…” Her attention turned out the window again, and Villanelle honestly could not determine what was so interesting about a few middle-year trees and concrete barriers on the motorway. “In the bathtub. She must’ve planned it. Remarkably tidy, for her.”

Villanelle grinned. “She never was that.”

“No, she was not,” Carolyn agreed, and Villanelle wondered how many meetings Carolyn had crashed: Eve’s wild hair tamed in a top knot, chewing on junk, scribbling away on a white board or a post-it note.

Villanelle tried the whole looking-out-the-window thing, wondering if some major emotional revelation would hit her, or if she would still just see brown buildings turn grey and boring people walking to boring jobs. At one intersection they passed an elephant, its trunk curled in the air while its feet stamped over the corpses of members of the Twelve.

Then again, Villanelle could've been mistaken. Shock wasn't the right word, but cruising with a government-tapped back stabber who'd granted her a pardon for her services left her bereft and hollow; unable to fill the emptiness with rage or tears or even inappropriate humor.

It was... _new._

“Where is she?” Villanelle asked.

“Villanelle—”

“I would like to see her.”

“I do not recommend that.”

“Excuse me if I do not take advice from the pinnacle of repression,” Villanelle snapped.

_Snapped!_

That was good, she thought. She was feeling something sad, which was to be expected. And overall, it felt— _honest,_ maybe.

_Real._

Villanelle could not articulate exactly how she felt, only that it was still Eve—only Eve, who made her feel things, even when she was not even alive any more!

_Remarkable._

“We all lose people, Villanelle,” Carolyn tried to divert her. “In our line of work, you’ll find that losses come in rather rapid succession.”

“I would like to see her,” Villanelle repeated, her grip so tight on the tissues in her left hand she had punctured the plastic on the outside.

_Funny._

She didn’t remember reaching for them.

“Charlie,” Carolyn said. “Bypass the SIS. We’re going to St. Thomas’s.”

Charlie looked up in the rearview and Villanelle made eye contact with him. She caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the mirror, and was happy to report that she only somewhat looked like she was going to lose her mind. Charlie looked away quickly. Perhaps he did not agree.

“Yes mam’,” he mumbled, and drove on.

* * *

Villanelle pulled the bottom of the sheet up, exposing Eve’s frozen toes from the cooler, her ankles, calves, knees, all the way up to her thighs. The cut was clean and precise, deep, and _so_ simple. It would have taken two minutes, perhaps, for Eve to lose enough blood to render herself unconscious. Another two, and she would've been dead.

Villanelle could not have done it better herself.

“Perfect,” Villanelle whispered, pulling the sheet back down.

She didn’t need to see Eve’s face. In her mind, Eve was smiling viciously, hacking away at dirty dozen numbers Ten, Seven, and Two with an axe, sitting astride her cancer elephant. Her hair was wild and her eyes were glazed with feral fury. She dismounted gracefully, set aside the axe, and took Villanelle into her bloody arms. She led her in time to magical music, because Villanelle truly had awful rhythm. A trickle of blood ran from the edge of her cracked lip, but Eve was cocking her brow up to look at Villanelle, as if to say:

_Your monster turned into a mammoth—a cheerleader! Look what it made me do. Look what you made me do!_

Eve spun her around, then disappeared.

It was so fucking sexy.

“You were perfect, Eve,” she said. Villanelle reached under the sheet and squeezed her cold hand. “Even if you did threaten me with a toilet brush.”

* * *

Villanelle had never been to a Korean-English wake before. There had been a service in a church yesterday where Villanelle sat on the very back pew, uncomfortable and looking so good in her mourning black that it was a crime she couldn’t brag about it to any of the sad people sitting at the front of the chapel. But today, she found herself in an old pub that looked a lot like Haverty’s, and there was food and flowers and a massive picture of Eve on an easel beside the snack table.

She met Eve’s mom, who was old as shit, but her hair was still quite long even if it was greyer than London. _Good genes_ , Villanelle thought. Villanelle allowed herself to daydream about what Eve’s hair would have been like if she’d lived long enough to go grey—perhaps Eve was already going grey, but had an excellent dye job?

Villanelle would never know, because Eve was dead now.

“I worked with Eve,” she said, squeezing her mother’s frail hand. She did not say, _I could have been your daughter-in-law! Crazy, right?!_

“Eve loved her job very much,” her mother said, casting a fond glance to the enlarged photo of Eve. In it, she looked a little drunk flushed, and smiled so hard Villanelle felt robbed of ever seeing such uninhibited joy.

Villanelle had scoured social media accounts for the perfect picture, bypassing every single image with Niko. Eve looked so different when she was with him, diminished somehow, and it would do Eve no credit to have others remember her as less than what she was. Villanelle finally decided on a photo timestamped from five years ago with Bill, her friend that Eve believed Villanelle would’ve liked, if circumstance had been kinder. She cropped out his balding head and had Bear do a bit of airbrushing and pixel-adjusting. The entire process was morbid as hell, but this was the one thing Villanelle promised she’d do right, and by God, she’d never failed on a job Eve had given her.

“Eve was the best person I ever worked with,” Villanelle told her mother, releasing her hand.

Villanelle departed from the congregation of Koreans swarming Eve’s mother to stare at Eve’s photo. They did work remarkably well together. And even when Villanelle was annoying, Eve, toward the end, found it endearing. Unlike Konstantin, who would not stop calling her a shit.

At least she was not as much of a shit as Eve’s penmanship. If the pinched ink on the exterior of the letter left on the coffee table was anything to go by, its contents would be damn near indecipherable. She remembered scrawling her Russian cursive in primary school, and even that series of squiggles looked better than the note Eve had left her.

She exited the pub and removed the envelope from her jacket. Leave it to Eve to give Villanelle an out when she most needed it. 

Villanelle loved her all the more for it.

_V—_

_I’m not really sorry, but you get it. You even said so yourself, sort of. I couldn’t keep up the way I was, not just with the half of it. You said it hurt worse, if you pushed it in slowly. So I’ll be quick about it. Just wanted you to know that, I guess. I’ve been practicing since Kedrin. When this whole thing—_ you, us _—started._

_You were the only person who really understood me. I think you were the love of my life because of it… I guess I’m sorry I never told you in person, but I’m glad we were able to get you away from the worst of the Twelve before I had to go. You’ve got time now. Go have a drink, talk to Andy, become an interior designer and please don’t dress women in my clothes to fuck them anymore. That’s weird as hell._

_I love you. Be free, Oksana._

_-Eve_

Villanelle shut her eyes as she leaned against the exterior of the pub. It was a bright summer’s day in London, which was bullshit, because London was never nice except for when Eve was not there to enjoy it, apparently. She didn’t cry, but she admitted the worst to herself, what she’d realized in the back of a Russian prison van, and in a garden in Niece:

_I don’t want to be free._

* * *

**One Year Later**

* * *

Villanelle sat on the north bank of the Tensift River in Marrakesh, about a mile away from the resort where she’d spent the last four nights. She’d saved up all of her money from her stint as an interior designer and blown it all on one final holiday; it just happened to be the case that Andy was finishing school to go and work with his uncle, a contractor, who needed a design consultant for his firm.

_Of course Eve would befriend the lone bartender in all of London who needed a designer._

Even in death, Eve had plans and connections, rapid-fire assumptions about what made Villanelle tick and how to keep tabs on her. And Villanelle had enjoyed the work, as much as one could when downgrading from contract killing, but she didn’t enjoy the freedom.

Wayward grief, like death, could be an excellent motivator.

Villanelle gave herself twelve months, then set out for one final job. She’d scoured thrift stores for a pair of scrubs with puppies on them that said things like _I WOOF YOU!_ and, _Get ready for a HOWLIN’ good time!_ She spent forty pounds on a pair of sky-blue Crocs, and nearly gagged in the cashier’s face. All that was left was forging an art therapy certificate.

At 9:03 am on a Thursday in August, Villanelle waltzed right into an old folks. Less than twenty minutes later, she waltzed out with a jar of Eve’s remains.

The sunset in Marakesh wasn’t nearly as ghastly a shade of pink as the scrubs had been. It was natural and swirly, bending light into tangerine and lilac and indigo, all the colors she would’ve dressed Eve in if she’d had the chance. Villanelle popped the cork of the champagne and drank directly from the bottle, letting the sweet fizz work its ways down her throat. After a few silent minutes, she scattered Eve’s ashes on the bank of the river and watched as some of the dust floated on top of the water. Everything was still in the twilight, and the moon was just starting to peek its round edge over the horizon. Villanelle placed two pills on her tongue, and chased them with bubbly.

“Not long now,” she said, blinking at the sky overhead.

Another pill. More champagne. Konstantin had never visited, called, or written, and Villanelle was woman enough to acknowledge that she cared a little, but not enough to change her mind. He wasn’t exactly worth living for.

In the past year, she’d started talking aloud to herself to fill the silence (and knew that Eve was dead and not listening to her, but she talked out loud to her all the same). She told dead-Eve about her days, and about how she’d always planned to go by poison, because some people are a little too vain to do anything to their beautiful bodies.

The pills worked gradually. So gradual, Villanelle noted the transition of colors to darkness, thick and warm.

She saw stars.

Drew a constellation of curls with her blinking gaze and imagined Eve’s eyes, intense as comets. 

Her breathing slowed.

A little more champagne.

One more dance to a sad song with Eve, but she couldn’t get up. _Oh well._ She’d dance while lying on the banks of the river. Tap her foot, or--no, that was rather difficult. A finger in the sand, carving out a pattern to the night music.

Villanelle never told anyone how much she missed her. Never let on what she was thinking of doing. She told dead-Eve, of course. Eve, dead or alive, always had a way of getting answers out of Villanelle.

Her eyes closed, her breath labored, shallow. It would all be over soon, but she didn’t speak the words to Eve like she usually did, about her breakfast, or her flights, or her designs. Not tonight. She fought against the poison’s effects one last time—one more glance at the stars.

In the darkness, she stared at a long line of sparkling dots connected to wide, radiating shapes in a lighter portion of the sky. She drew a circle with her gaze, a body; then traced large, rectangular legs down from the bulk of the beast, a harbinger she couldn’t ignore. She didn’t ask Eve if she saw it, because they both knew it was there.

Death. Looming large and obvious between them.

But in the end, it didn't matter.

They never really talked about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's the end! I can tell just from the hits this is definitely NOT everyone's cup of tea but if it makes you feel any better I've got three chapters of a post-season 3 fic in the works and it's reading like a straight-up comedy
> 
> come yell at me if you want i'm @southern-missy on tumblr and would love to make new fandom friends for KE!

**Author's Note:**

> i listened to sad country songs on spotify and here we are
> 
> jason isbell -- southeastern -- 2013


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